Time for councillors to ask tough transit questions

The members of Mayor John Tory’s executive committee have another chance to ask questions about Toronto’s transit future.

Thestar.com
March 7, 2016
By Royson James

Mayor John Tory’s executive committee meets Wednesday to approve an update to the city’s transit plan and do a right turn on Tory’s amended SmartTrack scheme.

History tells us the committee’s cringing courtiers, masquerading as councillors, will almost unanimously fall in line with the mayor’s latest designs - even at the risk of shovelling billions of dollars into unworthy projects.

Up until last month when Tory backed off elements of SmartTrack that planning staff fought to bury because they are impractical, these very councillors were ardent adherents to the SmartTrack dogma - evidence be damned.

Now they are given another chance to ask questions and be diligent, the way Councillor Josh Matlow has, seeking the evidence to back the projects calamitously conceived on the election campaign trail.

So, just in case a sliver of light penetrates the political bubble that sustains these too-compliant representatives of the people, here are questions they might dare to ask:

1. Freed of political interference, what would staff recommend as the next best steps for transit growth and improvements in Toronto?

In other words, how much of the current recommendations would remain, if the politics were removed.

2. Why is city staff recommending both SmartTrack (inserted by Tory) and the downtown relief line (in city plans for almost a century, and on the books since 1969)?

Tory said during the mayoral campaign that SmartTrack would provide quick relief to crowding on the Yonge line and push the need for the DRL down the road. The chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat maintains the relief line is absolutely needed. TTC CEO Andy Byford says the relief line is his first priority. So, is staff recommending both to placate the politicians when the DRL is their choice?

3. Why has staff not given due consideration and careful study to a proposal that avoids the duplication of SmartTrack and the Scarborough subway? It would see a line run off the Stouffville GO-SmartTrack service east into the Town Centre, essentially providing the same one-stop subway service at a fraction of the cost.

Where is the data or study results showing this is unfeasible, as staff claim?

4. In the future, how do you keep politicians at bay until the final stages of the planning process - a stage that appropriately requires them to choose from studied options?

5. Explain the wisdom of the Bloor-Danforth extension that clearly overloads the system and aggravates current crowding at Yonge-Bloor and along the Yonge line?

And how is it wise to avoid that scenario by moving passengers off that subway extension onto SmartTrack - knowing that SmartTrack would then divert so many riders that the ridership on the extension becomes too low to justify a subway?

6. York Region politicians claim as “mythology” the long-held pronouncements that the Yonge line is beyond capacity. What’s the evidence that automatic train control, SmartTrack and other improvements cannot ease the crowding to accommodate an extension of the Yonge line to Richmond Hill? Why not increase service on the Richmond Hill Go line to take passengers on an express service, without adding to the Yonge line?

7. As the city looks to add new transit service that funnel more passengers into the limited routes into downtown, the destination of choice, where is the plan to provide alternate routes to avoid crippling of the entire subway system with a shutdown of the Yonge line? “Essential redundancies,” it’s called, and good transit systems have this.

8. Peak period congestion at the Yonge/Bloor interchange is already approaching unsafe levels, even as increased densities in midtown add to the crush. What is the plan to address this - maybe with additional platforms?

9. Has everyone forgotten about the 2006 TTC report that recommended totally modernizing the Scarborough RT - to Vancouver SkyTrain level and standards - for $360 million? Even if you doubled the cost estimate, would this not give more bang for the buck - now at $3.2 billion, dropping to $2.5 billion with the one-stop subway?

10. If Scarborough politicians and residents don’t want LRTs or RTs - and if they tell us so via a referendum - then why provide Bus Rapid Transit (BRTs) on Sheppard and along Eglinton East?

11. What’s the future of the Toronto Transit Commission? The city has taken away all aspects of transit planning. The TTC is having historic problems with delays on construction of the Spadina subway extension. Will it soon lose the right to operate the buses, streetcars and trains?

12. The prevailing assumption is that GO fares will soon be integrated with TTC and all other GTA transit agencies. Work is underway. What are the deliverables for Toronto commuters? Is fare-by-distance - essentially what GO lives by - coming to Toronto commuters who did away with zone fares in the 1970s?

There’s more. But members of the executive committee get the drift. There is much to probe and debate instead of adopting a stance of docile deference.